Section archive - Beginning Teachers

This study explores the experiences of one first-year, Black female English language arts teacher and her Advanced Placement Language and Composition students. The findings reveal that the participant faced challenges when finding balance in her classroom management style, encountered cultural dissonance, developed teacher-student relationships, and struggled with how White, middle-class values may have shaped her classroom interactions with her students.

This study examines teachers’ behavioral, academic, and relational beliefs and how these beliefs shape the actions used in managing their classrooms. The author found that the participants focused primarily on behavior and academics when managing classrooms. The author concludes that these results suggest that a more relational orientation to classroom management is related to instructional quality. The author found that teachers also tended to implement actions that were consistent with their beliefs of classroom management, although they differed from one another in the extent that they focused on relational aspects.

This study aimed to better understand how teachers negotiate their emergent identities and the role emotional transactions play in this process. The authors organized the findings by four key features of what we call the process of ‘identity work’: (1) Incoming teacher beliefs; (2) Teacher identity emotional episodes; (3) Teacher attributions, and (4) and Identity adjustment. All of the participants could identify episodes or experiences during which they had salient emotional responses. Some participants elaborated the ways that these emotional responses served to confirm or further teacher identities/expectations they brought with them into their first year of teaching. Others argued that these events triggered a process of questioning or exploration regarding what their incoming beliefs were.

This article explored the differences between expert and novice teachers' perceptions and interpretations of problematic classroom events. The authors identified a number of differences in the way experts and novices perceived, interpreted and explained the problematic situations with which they were presented. The findings reveal that the novice teachers expressed significantly more visual perceptions. The experts, however, offered significantly more interpretations: they provided inferences about students, inferences about the teacher, and explanatory and/or reasoning statements. The authors conclude that novice teachers perceive students as key contributors to the problems which arise and escalate. However, the experts share their reasoning, explicating how and when problems emerge.